Indiana has a polluted reputation. Here's how bad it is.

Indiana residents care more about the environment than you might think, a new poll suggests. Top among their concerns are improving air quality, cleaning up polluted waterways, protecting wildlife and reversing climate change.
Dwight Adams/IndyStar

A three semi crash in Jackson County includes a HAZMAT spill on I-65.(Photo: Indiana State Police)

Look no further than Hoosiers' dependence on the automobile and the lack of investment in public transit. Or at the coal-fired power plants in southwest Indiana, whose pollution is carried by easterly winds across the rest of the state and beyond.

And all of that takes a toll on our health, according to Paul Halverson.

"I’m a Hoosier by choice, I love Indiana, but we’ve got some substantial health challenges," said Halverson, dean of the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI. "We have got to wake up and recognize that we are going the wrong way."

Halverson is among many sources who over the past several months have lamented to IndyStar about the state of Indiana's environment and its effects on public health. But just how bad is it? In honor of Earth Day, IndyStar scrubbed the web to find how the state shaped up according to a variety of environmental metrics. Here's what we found:

Overall environment

48th for quality of life: U.S. News & World Report releases an annual "Best States" ranking, and overall, Indiana hovers around the middle of the pack. But when it comes to environmental categories, it doesn't do so hot. The report's quality of life metric, which considers air quality and pollution among other things, puts Indiana in the 48th spot.

46th for natural environment: Another ranking by U.S. News and World Report measured states' natural environments using data related to drinking water quality, industrial toxins, pollution health risk and urban air quality. That assessment put us at No. 46.

42nd for eco-friendliness: There are many ways to look at a state's "green factor," which credit reporting site WalletHub attempted to do by considering each state's eco-friendliness. Based on 23 metrics (more on that methodology here), including air quality, green buildings, and solar capacity, Indiana ranked 42nd.

Pollution

6th worst for toxic chemical releases. Earlier this year, Pricenomics released a report that examined the quantity of chemicals each state releases into the environment, based on the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory. According to the report, Indiana released 133 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment in 2016, more than 44 other states.

46th for air quality: The United Health Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the for-profit health care company United Health Group, ranks states' air quality by the average exposure of the general public to particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less, also known as PM2.5. These small particles cause a lot of trouble in people's respiratory and cardiovascular systems.

1st for coal ash ponds: Indiana is 9th in the country for how much electricity it produces from coal, but it's No. 1 for coal ash ponds, the sometimes unlined pits containing toxic residue from burning coal. Those unlined pits are sitting in Indiana's water table, and new data suggests the toxins are leaching into Hoosiers' ground water.

Progress?

Not everything is about being better than someone else. Sometimes it's enough just to be better than who you were yesterday. So how does that shake out where Indiana is concerned? Here's what we found:

According to a 2018 report published by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, the state has made "significant progress" in its levels of ozone and PM2.5. For example, at its worst point (2000-2002), more than 500,000 people were breathing PM2.5 pollution year-round in areas that earned an F grade, compared to zero from starting in 2004 through 2016. Ozone followed similar trends. In short, our air is getting better by some measures.

That said, things still aren't great. The latest report card published by the American Lung Association gave 21 out of 30 counties for which data was available a C grade or worse for high ozone days. And because hotter days mean more ozone, global warming is only expected to make things worse.

As for water, it's hard to say if Indiana is getting better because water quality is tracked in a variety of ways. The EPA requires states to maintain a list of impaired or polluted waters, which IDEM is currently in the process of revising. According to the draft of that revision, 21,423 stream miles are considered impaired, which is an increaee by nearly 2,000 miles from the 2016 report. On the other hand, about 1,850 fewer lake acres were impaired in 2018. So, basically it was a wash: 261 impairments were downgraded from the worst category, but 233 were added.